Another great example of the absurdity and injustice of privatisation – on the April Fools’ Day this year, the ScotRail franchise will be handed to the Dutch state-owned Abellio, meaning Scots’ train fares will soon be subsidising railways in Holland!

As part of 48 Hour of Action for Public Ownership (on 31 March & 1 April 2015), Bring Back British Rail is launching a Thunderclap action to protest. If you use Facebook / Twitter, please sign-up to support:

Caroline Lucas MP will be supporting the protest at Brighton station (6.30 – 9.30am) and the Green Party leader Natalie Bennett will be at the London’s Kings Cross station protest (7.30 – 9.30am), where ITV’s Good Morning Britain and other media will be reporting on the action.

Bring Back British Rail supporters outside London King’s Cross Station on 19 August 2014 at our ‘All on Board for Public Ownership’ day of action (photo: Robin Prime). Please help us keep the pressure up by using Action For Rail’s simple online tool to email your MP.

Bring Back British Rail is supporting our friends at Action For Rail in their day of action this Tuesday 17 June against the merger of the Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern rail franchises into one ‘super-bad’ franchise run by Govia.

The private company Govia is a ‘joint venture’ between transport profiteers Go-Ahead and their partners in crime Keolis, which is 35% owned by French state railways. This is the perfect example of the absurdity of our privatised rail system, where our extortionate train fares are used to fund dividends for private shareholders and subsidise public transport overseas!

The fight to keep the East Coast mainline in public ownership goes on, in the face of the Coalition government’s determination to rush through the misguided and unnecessary re-privatisation our country’s most profitable and successful train line, before the next General Election.

Working with our friends at Action For Rail, we held a day of action at stations up and down the East Coast line on Friday 7 March 2014, to keep pressure up on MPs in order to make them see sense and delay their plans by the few months necessary to push the decision into the next parliamentary term.

This Tuesday 5 November marks twenty years since John Major’s government passed the opportunistic and short-sighted Railways Act, which permitted the breaking-up and selling-off of our beloved railways.

Since 2009, Bring Back British Rail has been working hard to ensure that the history of our once proudly publicly owned railway is not forgotten. With a fast growing network of supporters, the campaign aims to popularise the commonsense idea of re-nationalising the ludicrously over-priced and over-complicated system, which the people of Britain are now lumbered with after twenty years of privatisation – demanding a re-unified national rail network run for people not profit.

Please join Bring Back British Rail and our friends Action For Rail on Tuesday 5 November for a nationwide ‘Day of Action’ demanding the public ownership of our railways. Protest Against Privatisation Tuesday 5 November 2013 7:30 – 8:30 (8:00 AM photocall)

We have over 20,000 signatures already. If you don’t want to see our only publicly run rail route, fall back into the hands of the profiteers, then please make sure you add your name to the list before 18 October, and share the link with all your friends and colleagues too!http://you.38degrees.org.uk/p/keepeastcoastpublic

Please come and support us the day! Join us at Westminster and get behind our Bring Back British Rail banner and placards as we hand over the petition to Patrick McLoughlin, Secretary of State for Transport.

Friday 18 October 2013 9:30 – 10:30 (10:00am photocall)

Old Palace Yard Westminster London SW1

At 10am we’ll be joined outside Westminster by Caroline Lucas MP (Green) and Lillian Greenwood MP (Labour) for speeches in support of the petition and a photocall.

Transport is an essential public service and ought to be publicly owned and publicly controlled. We need an enormous expansion in the investment in our railways and that is the best way of achieving it.

Like most people in Britain, I think that a railway is a natural function of the state, and so ought to be run by the state – for the sake of coherence, transparency, continuity, accountability and national pride.